Caveat Emptor: Let the Buyer Beware -- an alert about WiX and their discredited website designer, Jonathan Roumaine

Not an endorsement, but a "let the buyer beware" alert:


Since you're considering working with Jonathan Roumain, there are some things you would probably like to know before you sign a contract, with him.

THE WORTH OF HIS WORD

Before we signed a contract, I told him the scope of the project (299 pages, half HTML and half Wordpress) and gave him all of the necessary links to preview the job.

The contract we signed included these four conditions:

1. full payment in advance
2. unlimited revisions
3. completion date: April 2022
4. 299 pages

HOW IT WORKED OUT

Shortly after I paid the full amount, in advance, he told me:

1. that the job was too much, for him
2. that he needed more money and more time
3. that he does best with sales funnels, not information-rich websites
4. that his rate per page is $600.00, which would have made his fee $179,400 -- about thirty-three times the amount of the contract we signed

In response to (2.), above, I proposed, instead, that he render the most important pages of the website -- 31 pages of 299 -- to save the time of redoing the entire project with someone else and to enable me to test whether the new look he and I were developing would pay off.

Reducing the number of pages (for the same money) didn't help. As of this date, the job is still incomplete and not suitable for publication.

He has balked at correcting his own errors, instead blaming me for too many "revisions". By his count, I have made 486 change requests, an average of 15-16 changes per page -- most of which are for faults in his renderings of pages such as:

1. inconsistent line spacings, paragraph spacings, margins, and font choices (size, color, boldface) (Would you find that acceptable?)
2. awkward line breaks (Would you find that acceptable?)
3. loss of logical flow of content within each page because -- by his own confession, he did/does not read the material before he designed out the page (Would you find that acceptable?)
4. missing or incorrect hyperlinks and missing trial-period payment cancellation buttons present on my published, older website (Would you find that acceptable?)
5. placing photos that had no relevance to adjacent text (Would you find that acceptable?)
6. twice, he said that he would create a video to show me how to "tweak" his work -- when that is his job (Would you find that acceptable?)
7. twice, he has gone non-responsive to my communications and done no work on my project for months

By any reckoning, for work that has been proofread before my seeing them, fifteen changes per page is a lot. These are faults that I would never have seen, if he had done competent proofreading.

Eight months after his self-declared deadline for completion, the job is still incomplete, with changes necessary on most of the pages he worked on, so they are unusable.

There are other items to report, but this is enough, I think.

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The WiX platform promotes Jonathan Roumaine in return of payment.

I informed WiX of all of the details above and they suspended his account -- temporarily.  Then, knowing what I wrote, above, they reinstated him.

That tells me something about their intelligence -- or their ethics.